‘Dark Phoenix’ Already Pulled From Almost Half Its Theaters

The general malaise around the summer box office is nowhere more evident than on Dark Phoenix, the latest and likely final film in the long-running, hugely-popular X-Men franchise. After three weekends in theaters, the film has grossed just over $60 million at the domestic box office, a dismally low number that doesn’t come close to the totals that most X-Men movies (even some of the crummy ones!) earned in just their first three days in theaters.

Even more alarming/depressing, even before Dark Phoenix’s third weekend of release, the movie was already getting pulled from hundreds of theaters around the country. It opened on roughly 3700 screens around America; last weekend, it played on just 2,000:

On those 2,000+ screens, Dark Phoenix grossed about $3.5 million — not on Friday, but over the whole weekend. There’s no almost no chance that by the time Dark Phoenix vanishes from the rest of America’s multiplexes, it will have earned more than the ultimate X-Men clunker, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, grossed in its first weekend of release back in 2009. (That movie opened with a whopping $85 million!)

Clearly, audiences were unconvinced they needed to see a second version of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” and without Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, they maybe weren’t too interested in seeing any of the X-Men in general this time around. Or maybe they thought Jackman gave the X-Men the appropriate ending the franchise deserved with Logan and Dark Phoenix was needlessly dragging things out. That’s actually not an unfair assessment.

If that’s the case, that’s not great news for The New Mutants, based on the X-Men spinoff comic, which is still scheduled to open in theaters on April 3, 2020.